Interview

Why did you decided to undertake and become an entrepreneur?

89Bits is a studio game, we make video games and we focus on sport fans. We let those sport fans become managers of their favorite teams.

With a wow effect. Whats this wow effect? We let them play while they watch the game live on tv.

My partner and myself we wanted to work on video games and make video games, but we didn’t have a background in the video game industry. It’s hard to join those kind of companies if you don’t have that experience so we decided to create our indie studio, an amateur studio, trying to make video games at the beginning and reach a career in the video game industry but as a startup instead of joining a company.

What kind of concerns do you want to solve?

In the short term our main concert is to reach our audience, we have a product we have launched it and had very good metrics at the beginning, its innovative and people understand, play and enjoy it. But instead of having x amount of users we need to multiply this by 10 – 100, we need to reach those customers, those potential users in order to to show our game, promotions activities and how to reach those potential users is our main concern.

What milestones of the past year would you stand out since winning OpenAxel?

When won Open Axel in November 2014, we had been working so hard in the soccer proposition, last year we had a Formula 1 product that you can interact live with the race. We learned a lot with that, we understood which are the second screen features that people like and love and we worked on other features that people need during the week, so we we put all of that together in the football product and we launched in August 2015. Since we won OpenAxel we have been working for 6-7 months really hard to launch and offer the football live product.

What projections or plans do you have in short and medium term?

Nowadays we are 100% focused on the product side, we are focused on the football product so now you can become a football manager, but now you can only play with the Spanish national league. You can’t play with Chelsea in UK or in the Bundesliga with Borussia Dortmund. So the first step for the expansion of our company and product is to make it available for other football fans from other leagues like Italy, France, UK and Germany, with this kind of product that still doesn’t exist so far and we have to extend the product to them so that they can play with more than just the Spanish League.

With that in mind The second step should be to extend the game to other sports, for example Basketball, basketball fans love the statistics, this is a kind of game that could really add something interesting for the basketball fans.

What has OpenAxel contributed so far and how do you think they can help you in the future?

OpenAxel gave us several things, a strong network in order to make it easier to reach someone, so if you want to talk with someone to gather feedback, or you want to talk about the commercial availability, the go to market, investors or any kind of feedback that you want to have, OpenAxel is there.

Apart from that the built a bridge, they allowed us to travel to San Francisco to learn about the reality there, how the startup world is evolving there, understand the reality of what is San Francisco and the United States in terms of startups and what you need to be there. Set up realistic goals in order to be there.

They also helped us in the promotion and activities, putting our company in the right place at the right time in order to talk to people or to be exposed to press or any type of media, and of course in some congresses regarding our industry.

Watch the full interview here

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 611715